How To Create And Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences Effectively

In this week’s Facebook Ads tutorial, we look at how to create Lookalike Audiences in Facebook Ads, and how to use them effectively in our campaigns.

Lookalike Audiences help you find more people who are similar to your current customers, your website visitors, your mobile app users and/or your Facebook Page’s fans, and creating them is a great way to scale your campaigns and find relevant/receptive audiences (warm audiences) in specific countries or regions. Those audiences range from 1% to 10% of the Facebook users in a selected country, who are the most similar to your “seed audience”.

What Is The Ideal Audience To Base A Lookalike Audience On?

The general rule is that to create a Lookalike Audience aka LaL or LA, you need to provide Facebook with a “seed audience”. Facebook requires that the seed audience should have at least 100 people in one country. This means that if you want to create a Lookalike Audience in the UK, then you need 100 people from one single country, regardless of if that country is the UK, Canada, Australia etc.

The quality of the seed audience heavily affects the quality of your Lookalike Audience, so be sure to choose wisely. From our experience, we suggest creating the following to use as seed audiences for Lookalikes:

Custom Audience based on customer file of customers

Website Custom Audience based on Facebook’s Pixel Add To Cart event

Website Custom Audience based on Facebook’s Pixel View Content event

Website Custom Audience based on Facebook’s Pixel View Category event

Engagement Custom Audience based on time spent watching your videos on Facebook

Engagement custom audience based on people who opened or completed a form in your lead ads

Here are some things that you need to have in mind when creating the above audiences:

The events mentioned above need to be implemented before creating the audience with a Facebook Pixel. Also, you should adjust the window (last X days) field to the maximum possible, to ensure a big as possible an audience size. Finally, you should consider using your custom list of people who purchased in the last, say, six months rather than 30 days. The more people you provide Facebook with to create a Lookalike, the better.

The good thing about Lookalike Audiences is that they are dynamically updated based on when changes are made to the source audiences (usually when new people are added or deleted from the source audience).

Your Lookalike Audience will be ready to use shortly after you create it (it usually takes 20-30 minutes).

You may wonder what the percentage in Lookalike Audience creation means. As already mentioned, Facebook enables you to create Lookalikes ranging from 1% to 10% of the population of your target country. Therefore, Facebook will find 414,5k Facebook users in the UK who are the most similar to your seed audience. The higher you go, the bigger the audience that Facebook will create for you to target.

Depending on the source audience, the quality of your LA may differ greatly. Why? Because, 1% of, say, a website custom audience is different from a customer list you get from your CRM. This is the reason why you should always test your audiences. Remember that there is no one set of audiences that fits all.

How To Structure Your Prospecting Campaigns Using Lookalike Audiences

Remember our previous tutorial on how to structure your Prospecting and Remarketing campaigns? We mentioned creating ad sets targeting 1% LA purchase, 3% LA purchase and 5% LA purchase. These LAs are the most common ones to use to get started because the increments help segment lookalike thresholds in a way that makes sense. For example, excluding a 1% LA from a 3% LA leaves a bigger audience to target than excluding a 1% audience from a 2%.

Depending on your budgets and advertising goals you can scale your campaigns by creating even higher percentages of LAs, such as 7% and 10%.

In all cases, do make sure that you are making the necessary exclusions to make sure that your audiences don’t overlap but to also make sure that your Facebook ads won’t experience any delivery problems.